Take a peek into human’s interconnectedness with this semester’s spring musical

In the spring musical, The Theory of Relativity, written by Neil Bartram, you’ll find a series of seemingly unrelated songs and monologues that come together to tell the story of life, where everyone is connected. In some way, we affect each other, even in the smallest ways.

The show’s guest director, Lisa Wipperling, works at Western Illinois University as an assistant professor of musical theater. The Theory of Relativity is her first show at Monmouth. 

 “The Theory of Relativity was a show I knew only briefly because of a song sung in my voice studio,” said Wipperling. “But when I was asked to dive into this project and help choose a show, this piece floated to the top because of so many songs that I fell in love with very quickly. Then I discovered that the collection of pieces here are a conversation about relationships and connections. There are things that are known, like acceleration of gravity and Pi is 3.14... But relativity is a theory, and parts of this theory are still not able to be proven or unknown. Parts of the script detail equations of collisions and relationships between numbers but it all comes back to relationships between humans and the connections they make. I compare this known part to the bonds between elements in a molecule.”

“Additionally,” she continues, “there are unknown connections of the basic forces in the universe which are related to the unknown of how someone will react to an action we make. You’ll see painted on the floor a large carbon molecule that represents life as we know it, the base molecule of life and the part we know. Moments of this work feel out of time, a bit otherworldly, and deal with how we relate to each other in space and time. The energy between us, the light we infuse in each other, it's all about the relative qualities and the relationships between each one of us… The last piece of the show states, ‘I am Nothing Without You’, and this feels like the most profound moment tying the connections and relationships together. Without each other and the bonds/relationships between us we are nothing. We are all the center of our own universes, but there would be no universe without you, the audience, coming to experience these stories.”

The Theory of Relativity opens April 18 and runs until the 21st. Shows Thursday through Saturday begin at 7:30 pm, and the Sunday matinee starts at 2 pm. Tickets are available through the Wells Theater Box Office or the Purplepass website.

Contributing Kiersten Fuhr